January 7, 2009: Doubt Thinking back on my viewing of Doubt, I recall a lean, purposeful story about moral struggles laid over the struggles for power and influence in a New York City catholic church and boys’ school in the 1960s. This is one of those movies which grows in my estimation in the weeks […]
January 6, 2009: I’ve Loved You So Long I went out to see I’ve Loved You So Long during that January period in which I’m trying to make my best stab at Oscar contenders, before the nominations are actually announced, to hopefully reduce my “workload” in February. This one had a lot of buzz over […]
January 6, 2009: Changeling OK, so call me illiterate, but I didn’t know what the word Changeling meant when I started watching this movie. As it turns out, I didn’t know the definition by the end of the movie either, so I never really came to accept what it was about, and that may have […]
January 4, 2009: Vicky Cristina Barcelona Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the latest entry from the prolific and very personal filmmaker Woody Allen. Allen was involved with numerous comedic projects although mostly behind the scenes in the 1960s. He rose to prominence as an auteur in the 1970s with a wide variety of films, reaching a […]
January 1, 2009: Frost/Nixon Now, here we have a nice contrast to my earlier review of Milk, the film about the late San Francisco city councillor Harvey Milk. Frost/Nixon is a story about two people, but it doesn’t purport to be about their lives. It is about a specific event in their lives, and that’s […]
January 1, 2009: Bullitt It’s a total embarrassment that I had never seen Bullitt (1968) before. I mean, I’ve had literally my whole life to get around to it. I like Steve McQueen, I like detective movies, I was raised on muscle cars and even owned an old Dodge Charger, and yet I had never […]
December 31, 2008: Milk Milk is another biopic with serious Oscar potential, and while this is a genre which the Academy seems to love, I really have trouble investing myself in it. Having in recent years seen Ray, the film about Ray Charles, and Walk the Line, the film about Johnny Cash (which I sometimes […]
December 30, 2008: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation The National Lampoon is at least nominally the film world’s offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon magazine. The pedigree of the Harvard Lampoon is a whole story in itself, and some of its past editors are well-known in the comedy world, though largely behind the camera. The early National […]
December 22, 2008: Wendy and Lucy Wendy and Lucy is a low-key, independent film which has crept onto a lot of 2008 top ten lists, not without merit. It’s a sparsely told story of a young woman and her dog who have fallen on very hard times, and chronicles a few days in her life […]
December 19, 2008: A Christmas Story A Christmas Story (1983) is one of those cult classic Christmas movies, which some hold near and dear to their hearts, and others have no use for. This being my first viewing, my opinion was as yet unformed. Yes, I know I should have seen this before, but it’s […]